Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

  “I got my eye on a whole litter of English setters,” Rollo said dreamily. “I always wanted to train a litter. They’re five weeks old down in Helena right now. I’ll have to get you out here to hunt. Just imagine hunting with seven dogs at once.”

  Brown Dog had raised his tremulous spirits by imagining what it was going to be like to teach little Susi how to fish, pick berries and morel mushrooms, and avoid poison ivy. He would have to write Gretchen a letter though he had only written a few in his life.

  Chapter 7

  Before dinner Rita figured out a list of what they would need to fence five acres and a seven-compartment kennel. She also advised acquiring a sizable child’s plastic swimming pool for the coming heat of the summer. It’s a peculiarity to the United States above forty-five degrees latitude that the temperature can vary from forty below zero to one hundred above. Few properly understand that Montana is classified as high desert and wouldn’t exist as is without an immense amount of irrigation for crops. The water comes from the buildup of snow in the mountains that begins to melt in May.

  Rita was dressed to go to a meeting after dinner about the fatal equine virus that threatened the horses of the west. The horses had all been quarantined against travel and all events canceled. You would have thought that the horses were Rita’s children, but in fact for all practical purposes they were.

  B.D. and Rollo sat beside her at a desk while she added up the figures. B.D.’s attention wavered with her scent which he finally determined was Camay soap. He couldn’t help but be aroused but she looked at him with dismay rather than anger. His single spare shirt after the rain soaking was Hawaiian with a tear in the collar that he had bought in a thrift store for its dancing hula girls. He was amazed at the sketch and page of figures where she figured out the yards of fencing and poles they would need plus the kennel material that would be constructed in the calving shed.

  “I’m getting Roy a Pro-Fence to help you. I am also borrowing a power auger for the holes. Roy’s deaf but he’ll work your ass off.”

  “We’ll head for Great Falls tomorrow for the material,” Rollo said as if he were a pro.

  “No you won’t. I’m ordering by phone. Mom said you were grounded. You’d just get drunk at the tiki bar and go to the strip club. Maybe I’ll take you in when you’re all done.”

  “At the tiki bar you just sit there drinking whiskey and eating free popcorn and watching girls in the motel pool through the glass partition,” Rollo said lamely.

  “Sounds good to me,” B.D. said, a bit amazed at Rita’s competency. She had whipped Bruno into shape in no time announcing she was going to make a cow dog out of him. He had made friends and was hanging out with her vicious stallion when he wasn’t hunting pack rats. He was obviously pissed that Mom didn’t allows dogs in the house but when he scratched at the door, she yelled at him so loud he ran for it.

  B.D. walked home to his cabin in hopes of tamping down a couple of pounds of spaghetti which had made him a tad homesick for the U.P. He readily admitted that it was better than his own and quickly corrected the tinge of homesickness by recalling the mud bath he had escaped. Throughout his adult life a closely held tenet had been that a regular job was the worst of all worlds. One of Grandpa’s friends had been a school janitor for thirty-nine years and had only lived five months into retirement. It had been a huge community funeral but B.D., though a mere nine at the time, had figured that Freddy likely didn’t know.

  B.D. had borrowed paper and a ballpoint to write a letter to Gretchen. He hurried along wanting to reach the cabin before dark, because without a flashlight he figured he was susceptible to rattlers though Rita said that the evening was fifty degrees and they wouldn’t be active.

  He arranged his paper and pen just so on the kitchen table and then made the mistake of turning on the radio, a mistake for an inexperienced writer. There was a dismally sad song by Merle Haggard that blew away his thoughts which anyway were ill formed. He recognized the enemy and turned the radio off thinking that if writing was so hard it might not be natural. Way back when, a probation officer had told him to write down his thoughts and it had been brutally difficult. One had been, “If a girl gives you a six-digit phone number that means she doesn’t want to hear from you.” That didn’t seem especially smart as time passed. He went to the fridge thinking that a beer might get him started remembering only as he opened it that he didn’t have one. But then my God there was a six-pack with a note from Rita, “You get two a day, buster.” A beer did it. “Dearheart, I am building a dog operation for Rollo. He’s buying seven pups. I should be home in two weeks. I nearly caught a big brown trout but it broke off. Kiss Susi for me. I miss you. Love, B.D.”

  He was fairly proud of his work but more than a little exhausted. He put his head down on his arms on the table for a rest as he had done all too often at school. He’d sneak out the back window when he was sure Grandpa was asleep to create a little mayhem with his toughie gang. At school he’d hope for a few minutes of sleep before the teacher shook him awake.

  It seemed very long in dreamtime with choruses of singing mice and rattlers in the manner of early Disney movies and a troubling fish that was neither brown or brook trout but part of both. There was a hand lightly on his shoulder and he wrenched himself away from the table with a shout nearly knocking over Rita who stood there with a large full sack.

  “Calm down. I got you some clothes at Walmart. You look homeless.”

  “You got your knife?” B.D. was confused.

  “Of course but my pistol is in the car. I’m edgy when I travel. At home I’m nice. Plus it looks like my horses are safe from equine virus.” She helped herself to a beer from B.D.’s ration and shook the clothes out on the table.

  “I usually favor used clothes. They’re broken in.” He was still edgy to be alone with Rita and her knife and told her so. “A beer might help.” Now she was sitting on his bed and his compass suddenly tilted toward hope. She patted the comforter beside her.

  “Let me tuck you in in the best way possible.”

  And she did. He had the feeling that her legs went around him twice. When she left in about an hour she told him not to expect it to happen again but then they were always saying that. It was rarely true except for his beloved Gretchen who only wanted a baby. For the first time it occurred to him that she might want another child. Hope again.

  Chapter 8

  B.D. awoke feeling manly, certainly a set of dubious emotions. He was listening to the dawn flurry of birds which didn’t offer the dense music of the warblers in the U.P. where the dense arboreal home was so vast. Bird music along with the scent of Rita was a kind way to awaken. Was her soap Dove or Camay? Rita, suspecting his abilities, had set up the coffee machine for him so that all he had to do was press on. For decades he had simply boiled his coffee dropping in a fresh eggshell toward the end to clarify it.

  He stepped outside in his skivvies and there was a young man Rollo called “Roy the Deaf Boy” sitting on the cottonwood stump. B.D. waved but Roy shyly looked away. B.D. went back in and checked the refrigerator where there was sausage and also eggs and he had a half-pound patty. Many had told him that too many eggs were unhealthy. He never replied because Grandpa had always cracked him a half dozen for breakfast. He also liked to slather his eggs with hot homemade horseradish but there was none to be had. Three cinnamon rolls helped though the sausage was undercooked. He didn’t care because he felt as pleasant and dumb as any well-fucked man. He barely had time for a cigarette when Rita arrived with a tractor and auger followed by a big truck from the Great Falls Fencing Company. Rita had said that a dog fence didn’t need the solidity of a cow or horse fence though the corners still had to be thickish wood poles to bear up under the two-way strain.

  Later B.D. figured it was one of the hardest stretches of work he had ever done. It was a matter of keeping up with Roy who at about 180 pounds was the strongest man B.D. had ever met, and also the fastest. They worked from six in the morning unti
l three in the afternoon, when Rita said Roy had to be back at the home ranch to work until dark. Roy ate his lunchtime sandwich standing up while B.D. sprawled in the grass trying to stay awake. He had the added strain of Rita’s nightly visits which he thought of as too much of a good thing given his daily work. Such arduous work frees one from mental problems as it does any beast of burden. Occasionally Gretchen, essentially a lost love from the time they had met, passed gently through his mind but he didn’t have the energy to think of rude Cheryl and her manly triceps.

  The disappointment came the fourth day on the job. Each day he would rest from 3 to 4 PM, and then he and Rollo would go fishing until dinner, generally at 7 PM. They would drive up the lane of a friendly neighboring rancher and then B.D. would help Rollo and his walker across a shallow channel in their mud boots, knee high for the ubiquitous mud of corrals, then easily reach the far side of the grassy island and the river. B.D. had fine brown trout fishing on a bristly blackfly called the wooly bugger. Fishermen have a tendency to have a fidelity to their home ground where they habitually fished but B.D. doubted there was any place on earth where the brown trout fishing was as good as here. He even caught a hot acrobatic rainbow of three pounds that jumped pretty high five times. Half of the fish he caught would be trophies back in Michigan.

  The fourth afternoon the shit hit the fan as it were, from unexpected quarters. B.D. had pretty much ignored anything Rollo had said about the snowmelt coming from the mountains. The weather had turned warmish the last two days, so much so that Rita had brought him one of those sports drinks with his lunch. It didn’t taste very good but it was full of potassium and other trace minerals to counter profuse sweating that occurred when he tried to keep up with Roy the Deaf Boy on the fencing job. B.D. had wondered if Roy was taking meth but that seemed unlikely.

  So they got to the Missouri that fourth day and it was baby-shit brown. B.D. stood there with his rigged fly rod shivering with horror.

  “It’s the Dearborn,” Rollo said.

  “What the fuck are you saying?” When Rollo said “Dearborn” B.D. immediately thought of the place near Detroit where Henry Ford worked on developing the Ford car. It was confusing.

  “It got warm and the Dearborn River is upstream. It comes out of the high country and the snowmelt started. It picks up mud in the low country. It will clear up in a week or so.”

  B.D. felt tears coming. If he couldn’t fish he wanted to get the fuck out of there and go home. Of course the rivers and creeks in the U.P. ran high when the snow melted, sometimes nearly three hundred inches near Grand Marais but everything cleared pretty fast. He had the homey image of cooking a brook trout lunch for Gretchen, old Delmore, but then Cheryl intruded on his fantasy hogging the fried potatoes. In the fatal present Rita was spooking him. She had to have all the lights out. One night she had a crying jag because she had had an abortion at fourteen and she thought she couldn’t get pregnant and now at thirty she wanted a baby. B.D.’s cock had wilted and she said, “What’s wrong?” and he had said “life.”

  “Got ’im,” Rollo yelled near the pickup. He was on his knees in the grass and grabbed a large, writhing snake that wrapped its thick length around his arm. He patted it to calm it down and noticed that B.D. had jumped up on the hood of the pickup.

  “You fucking moron!” B.D. yelled. “That’s a rattler!”

  “It’s not a rattler, it’s a bull snake. It just looks and acts like one. It actually kills rattlers by squeezing them to death. You should feel its strength.” Rollo offered his snake wrapped arm to B.D. who slid off the far side of the pickup hood.

  “You must get over your fear, son.” Rollo said in the manner of a preacher. “I had a bull snake as a pet when I was a kid. I took it to school in my lunch bucket in the third grade. When I let it loose it emptied the room. Snakes get pissed at everyone except if they know their owner.”

  Chapter 9

  On the seventh day they rested. It was a very warm morning and all that was left to do was to assemble the kennels themselves to be assembled in the opening of the calving shed. B.D. couldn’t figure out the directions and all the parts didn’t quite fit. Rita stepped in with her quick wit.

  “You got it backward, asshole,” she said daintily.

  “Thanks.” B.D. was all played out. He was thinking about Roy the Deaf Boy not getting paid. All of his hard labor was in trade for Rita breaking three horses for Roy’s boss. Rita told him that Roy was forbidden by the authorities to be around girls and he said, “In the movies all ranching people are normal.”

  “Fuck you. Tell me what’s normal.” She was throwing around heavy pieces of the kennels and her strength was that of a man he thought. He had watched her briefly breaking a horse but quickly withdrew because the horse’s violence made him fearful for Rita. Watching Rita sort the kennel pieces was enervating and he drifted off to sleep thinking of ranchers and movies. Roy the sexual predator was awkward. In his difficult winter it made it much worse that Delmore had returned to his old fascination with the Planet of the Apes series of movies after they started remaking them, which drove B.D. quite mad. Delmore at age eighty-seven accepted the movies as gospel. The apes were at work somewhere and needed shooting. Meanwhile we were wasting our time in Afghanistan. Delmore had known Arabs in Detroit and said you couldn’t change them because they had been Arabs for tens of thousands of years just like Indians.

  Rita had the kennels assembled by noon while B.D. slept in the shade of the calving shed. He had worked twelve hours the day before with Roy, finishing the fence, and had had a big dinner, but then Rita tracked him to the cabin and had a fit. It was near the anniversary of the death of her father in a car wreck seventeen years before, the event that caused her to run off to Great Falls at fourteen. Her mom had slipped into a depression and was no help. B.D. felt an anguished empathy and struggled to stay awake. They made love in the evening light but he was so fatigued he could barely see.

  She nudged him with a toe to the neck which didn’t work and then screamed “Brown Dog,” and he sprung to his feet in a state of shock.

  “That was for fun,” she said.

  “Lucky you didn’t have a pail of water.”

  They all had a lunch of hot chili with the beans on the side which B.D. felt could have used a few beers. Mom was going pretty hard on Rollo. She was letting them go to Great Falls to pick up a plastic swimming pool for the pups which would be fetched from Helena the next day. It was to be a no-drinking trip according to her. The seriousness of her words were lessened by the fact that Bruno had climbed the ladder she had been using to wash windows and was barking furiously.

  “Bruno likes Mexican food,” B.D. said and Rita took out a small portion. Once while cooking he had dropped a jalapeño which Bruno ate and spit out too late. Bruno tried to bite his leg but B.D. had pretty much cured that biting behavior by grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and running a little cold water on his head which the dog found humiliating.

  On the way to Great Falls B.D. felt a bit of ice in his stomach. He felt Montana was too large for him. He didn’t want to see thirty miles in so many directions. You could see farther than the distance between Seney and Grand Marais. It also bothered him that he had lost his fake Social Security card within a few days of receiving it via Gretchen’s address. He had hesitated to put it in his superthin wallet which contained his only identification on earth, his driver’s license. He was gun-shy about wallets because as a child snoop he had poked in Grandpa’s and found a miniature photo of a pretty young woman who wasn’t Grandma as there was a framed photo of her in the parlor. She had died of breast cancer in her thirties just after her daughter’s death. That meant the photo in the wallet must be his mother. The shock meant that he never again wanted to touch a wallet. There was a chance that Bruno had eaten the Social Security card that he thought he had left on the table. Maybe there had been a speck of gravy on it from the venison stew. Some dogs will eat a head of lettuce if you put a teaspoon of venison gra
vy on it. Once Bruno had eaten the contents of the sugar bowl and was off the wall, literally, for an hour then slept the rest of the day.

  B.D. drove at 50 mph, all the pickup could manage, so that cars and trucks whizzed by him, some beeping because his slowness was a menace. Meanwhile Rollo was irritating him with attacks on his mother’s obsession with AA. It seemed peculiar since booze had given Rollo several near-death experiences not to speak of the loss of two fine properties through divorce while Mom’s sobriety had done well by her. Rita had said her mom had drowned her grief for a year after her husband’s death in the auto accident. Then one warm summer night her mother had fallen down out in the yard and awoke at dawn with a rattlesnake coiled on her stomach. The rattlesnake told her to quit drinking so she joined AA and was able to retrieve Rita from the ranch west of Great Falls where she was taking care of a herd of horses.

  B.D. had real trouble dealing with Costco. He had never been in a box store because the need had never arisen. The rack of goods seemed to go up a thousand feet and gave him vertigo. He began to sweat profusely. What if there was an earthquake? Rollo was off looking for the plastic swimming pool and B.D. was somewhat consoled by the great array of meat and wine.